Metaphilosophy

Metaphilosophy (sometimes called philosophy of philosophy) is "the investigation of the nature of philosophy". Its subject matter includes the aims of philosophy, the boundaries of philosophy, and its methods. It is considered by some to be a subject apart from philosophy, while others see it as automatically a part of philosophy, and still others see it as a combination of these subjects. The interest in metaphilosophy led to the establishment of the journal Metaphilosophy in January 1970.

Relationship to philosophy

Some philosophers consider metaphilosophy to be a subject apart from philosophy, above or beyond it, while others object to that idea.Timothy Williamson argues that the philosophy of philosophy is "automatically part of philosophy", as is the philosophy of anything else. Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu write that the separation of first- from second-order study has lost popularity as philosophers find it hard to observe the distinction. As evidenced by these contrasting opinions, debate persists as to whether the evaluation of the nature of philosophy is 'second order philosophy' or simply 'plain philosophy'.

Paul Horwich

Paul Horwich (born 1947) is a British analytic philosopher at New York University, whose work includes writings on causality and philosophy of science and philosophy of physics, the philosophy of language (especially truth, and meaning) and Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Horwich earned his PhD from Cornell University; his thesis advisor was Richard Boyd (title of the doctoral thesis: The Metric and Topology of Time). He has previously taught at MIT, University College London, and CUNY Graduate Center.

In Truth (1990), Horwich presented a detailed defence of the minimalistic variant of the deflationary theory of truth. He is opposed to appealing to reference and truth to explicate meaning, and so has defended a naturalistic use theory of meaning in his book Meaning. Other concepts he has advanced are a probabilistic account of scientific methodology and a unified explanation of temporally asymmetric phenomena.

In the context of philosophical speculations about time travel, Horwich coined the term autoinfanticide to describe a scenario, depicting a variant of the grandfather paradox, in which a person goes back in time and deliberately or inadvertently kills his or her infant self, although he malformed the word as "autofanticide".

Timothy Williamson

Timothy Williamson, FRSE, FBA (born Uppsala, 6 August 1955) is a British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.

He is currently the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of New College, Oxford. He was previously Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh (1995–2000); Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, Oxford (1988–1994); and Lecturer in Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin (1980–1988). He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 2004 to 2005.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters,Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Education

Timothy Williamson's education began at Leighton Park School and continued at Henley Grammar School. He then went to Oxford University. He graduated in 1976 with a B.A. (first class honours) in Mathematics and Philosophy, and in 1981 with a doctorate in philosophy (D.Phil.) for a thesis examining "The Concept of Approximation to the Truth".